Bolduc, Morse, Hassan, and the New Hampshire GOP primary
New Hampshire held its late party primaries yesterday. The only interesting races were on the Republican side and Democrats had a hand in two of them. In the Senate contest to pick a challenger to vulnerable incumbent Maggie Hassan, Don Bolduc faced off against Chuck Morse. Democrats supported Bolduc because he is the less viable candidate.
Bolduc has been declared the winner in a relatively close race. If you do a search for articles about him, you’ll find the MSM regulars crowing that he’s a far-right “election denier” whose nomination “has realized GOP fears.”
Perhaps. But I’ve followed the race for a while, and here’s my take on it.
Both GOP candidates, Bolduc and Morse, were weak, although in very different ways. The Democrats absolutely tried to push Bolduc for their own ends, but it was Morse who closed the gap considerably in the final run, not the other way around. Bolduc is the more colorful and extreme political figure – with obvious vulnerabilities along those lines – whereas Morse is remarkably lackluster. From what I could find in polls (there weren’t many really recent ones), both were polling similarly against Democrat incumbent Maggie Hassan, who is also relatively unpopular. So they both were within a couple of points of her.
Initially it had been thought that popular New Hampshire Republican Governor Sununu would be Hassan’s GOP opponent in 2022 and that he would win handily. But once he announced he was not running for the Senate, no particularly “viable” GOP Senate candidate presented himself or herself. So Bolduc and Morse it was.
New Hampshire is an odd and quirky purplish state. It is very small, for starters. Therefore a campaign such as the one the Democrats waged during this primary, to get Democrats to vote for the GOP candidate considered less “viable,” in a year in which the Democrat race wasn’t in real contention, could very well succeed in selecting that GOP candidate the Democrats prefer. I don’t know for sure that that’s was what happened yesterday in New Hampshire to give Bolduc the edge, but it certainly might have been.
However, I’m not the least bit sure that the “MAGA Republican” Bolduc will be a worse candidate than snoozer Morse would have been, although that is the common MSM “wisdom.” In my opinion, neither would have been a good challenger for the similarly lackluster but loyal-Democrat Hassan, who presents herself as a moderate but who votes for virtually every leftist Democrat bill like the good apparatchik she is. She is vulnerable, but only to a good candidate.
Another oddity of New Hampshire is that for the most part it likes its federal politicians blue and its state politicians red. That, more than anything, doesn’t bode well for the Republican Bolduc in the Senate race. But I’m not counting him out. And I don’t think Morse would have had a better chance of beating Hassan either.
They have a long record of deciding which Republican they want to face. It’s not clear how accurate that is, though. I am old enough to remember when they were just dying to see us nominate Reagan, for instance.
Eeyore:
Unfortunately, Bolduc is no Reagan. Would that he were.
Bolduc is more like LePage, as far as I can tell so far.
Bolduc is retired military and Morse is small business. Both men are in early old age. Morse has held p/t public offices for 20-odd years. Hassan is a lapsed lawyer who quit practicing in her early 40s.
The wiki entry on Gen. Bolduc is crapped up with crude editorializing; idiocracy is now.
“New Hampshire is an odd and quirky purplish state.”“- Neo
Indeed, this spring New Hampshire legislators voted to secede from the United States. Contrary to the New Hampshire motto, “Live Free or Die”, it wasn’t because of the increasing Democrat tyranny in DC, but a quirk in the legislative rules.
It did get 13 aye votes, so at least a few New Hampshirites do want to Live Free.
https://patch.com/new-hampshire/nashua/analysis-why-did-153-nh-democrats-vote-keep-secession-bill-alive
Saw a NeverTrump Republican talking about this race on Twitter. Says it’s the voters fault for supporting candidates like Bolduc but completely ignores his own responsibility. As in, if Bolduc loses it will almost certainly be because NeverTrumpers like him smeared Bolduc and refused to vote for him.
It’s much easier to understand how we got in this mess when you accept that many people on the Left and Right, especially ones who talk about politics a bunch, view our political discourse and process as nothing more than a virtual signaling contest. Every issue is decided on the basis of how it makes them feel or how they think it makes them look.
Mike
This race, along with Colorado’s, are the two ‘sleeper’ elections of this year’s Senate contests. They are getting scant attention but both Democrat incumbents are pretty lackluster. The GOP challengers are likewise unknown and fairly uninteresting (though O’Dea in Colorado is making a bit of a name for himself), so no one is thinking or talking much about the two races. After all, we’ve only had umpteen articles about Fetterman’s health and Oz’s weak campaign, we need umpteen more!
I know Boldoc is anathema to much of GOPe, but I hope some conservative PACs throw a bit of money at this race. Democrats don’t seem to be much focused on protecting Hassan, and it might not take much money in this small state to push the race into the Toss-up category; even possibly pull off an upset.